In the future, you'll use a speech-based interface to access all the world's knowledge – including your own personal memories – stored in the cloud, according to a legendary engineer who was a member of the team that designed Apple's original Macintosh user interface.
"More and more people have smartphones in their pockets ... …

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NLP hell, we'll need better carriers first

Because, yeah, at a time when data's getting more and more expensive to do wirelessly, this is going to be the big new thing. Maybe my brain isn't implemented on a RAID array somewhere in some bog-standard datacenter that some marketing dipshit fondles himself while calling "the cloud"-- but, lack of multiple-brain redundancy within my cranium or no, I'm *damn* sure I'll never have to pay ten cents a megabyte to access the stuff I've got stored in it. (And I can outsource all my disaster recovery planning to the local hospital's emergency department!)

Not only that, does anyone remember how thoroughly they had to rig Deep Blue so it could beat Kasparov, tuning up its play between each pair of matches and all that? Has it occurred to anyone that this Jeopardy outing might well be nothing more than another IBM-standard publicity stunt, with all the suit-and-tie Oompa Loompas carefully swept behind the scenes so nobody can see them running their little orange asses off to keep the rigged demo on the rails?

Prior Art?

older...

In the book "Snow Crash" the author detailed the Librarian system and that was published in 1992. Isaac Asimov had similar systems used in the Foundation saga published even earierl.

That said, prior "description" is not patentable, unless that description described systems and processes specifically that would lead to how it was DONE, but just what it looks like. If Sci-Fi could be patented that way, we'd still be in the dark ages respective to our current standing, and only the fiction authors would be rich.

BS

I think this guy spent a bender last weekend watching Star Trek: NG and Final Cut (for those of you not in the know, Final Cut is a SciFi about a tech that embeds a recorder in the brain, at birth, that records everything the person sees and hears from their visual perspective [eyeballs] and is used to make a memorial video about their life after they die).

The problem with entirely vocal access to computers is privacy. If you've got a nifty in-eyewear screen, ear piece, cam, etc. and you're on a subway wanting to check your bank records... "Computer, open my bank account and display last week's transactions." Yeah, smart move. Perhaps "Computer, pull up that Scottish sheep porn from yesterday." Or, "Computer, open my LibDem activist website." What would be better than a vocal interaction would be to control the computer with a thought. Currently, we have the archaic move-the-mouse hat-tricks, but hopefully they'll work on a more memory-print level or the like. Probably not to the extent of The Matrix, but at least the computer may understand you're thinking about your money and will pull up a HUD with your current funds. Perhaps a bit of look-at-icon-and-think-"click" magic too for the things the computer hasn't been taught to recognize yet (brain imprinting is like speech recognition; it needs to be trained).

GITS

What about memories which aren't yours?

"He envisions a day when "every conversation you've had, and every place you've visited, and every memory that you want to keep could be stored on the cloud. It's recorded by your little earpiece that's got a video camera."

That's hardly recording your memory. It's just recording whatever happens to be in the direction that the earpiece is looking, which might well not be what your eyes are looking at - assuming they are open! For a moment I thought this guy was seriously envisaging a cross between Total Recall and Strange Days...

indeed

Yes, but...

A talking/listening interface is SLOW. You can type, point, and click MUCH faster. This is easily demonstrated by trying to talk to someone who is in front of the computer and being TOTALLY frustrated by trying to do it.

The only thing that really is fast enough is probably a Vulcan mind meld, and we just don't know how to to that (yet!).

The controlling thing is that absorption via the optical nerve is a VERY high bandwidth device. By comparison, the ear is much slower. So, until the Vulcan mind meld happens, we will need some Borg like interface covering up one of those two high bandwidth interfaces we use everyday.

I agree

One of the things I find most frustrating at the moment is the rise of information delivered via youtube. Generally when I'm reading information I'm not interested in 100% of it, so I tend to scan the bits I don't give a shit about and pay more attention to the bits I do. Videos don't allow me to do this. This means I potentially have to sit through 10 minutes of guff for the 1 minute I'm actually interested in, because I have no idea where abouts in the video the bit I want will appear. This seems it'll just make matters worse.

When they introduced the guy as working on the original Macintosh team, all I could think about was Scottie shouting 'Hello, Computer' into the mouse.

UI designers who don't understand sensory affordances...

Yes, it's a wonder how many of these hotshot UI types don't understand basic issues of user interaction design, such as different sensory affordances. Even the QWERTY keyboard, with its well-known inefficiencies, is far superior to simple audio recording (forget ASR) as an input device for some purposes.

Or, say, the rather obvious fact that different people use tools in different ways, so there won't ever by one magic perfect-for-everyone UI technology.

In any case, anyone who pays even the slightest attention to NLP research knows that the IBM Jeopardy demo system - impressive though it may be - does not mean we're anything like close to deep conversational understanding. People are just beginning to develop effective algorithms for things like conversation entailment. We have a huge way to go.

Hell, human listeners often have to ask for clarification, and make errors in interpretation. Now let's multiply those failure modes by implementing them on systems that control important technologies. ("No, I did NOT want you to text that rant to my boss! Bad phone! Bad!")

welcome!

and of course "in the cloud" = controlled by some megacorp, be it Googlintosh or Macrosoft or whatever. And anyone not wearing their personal monitoring device is suspect, because "if you don't want the whole world to know what you're doing, perhaps you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"!

Facts ...

I wonder if I'm the first to post that the famous "Blue Marble" picture, to which he is undoubtedly referring when he comments about Apollo 11, was actually taken by the crew of Apollo 17... And it's almost always printed upside down.

Also, I think I'd prefer to have my memories recorded in the squishy thing between my ears. It doesn't always work very well, but it's always there, never has flat batteries, and doesn't require me to go around with a camera strapped to my head.

Struck me as well

I think the first really distant views of the earth came from Apollo 8. Just one of the reasons why, at the time, it was as big a deal as the first moon landing was later. Being the first human spaceflight to leave earth orbit, fly over 200,000 miles to the moon, and then complete several lunar orbits before returning its crew safely to earth.

Shhh!

And when I see somebody: 'Okay, I know his name is Bill, but what was his last name? Where does he live? What does he do?', and I'm spacing out on that stuff, [but] my assistant is watching, and understands the situation, and ... is filling me in."

...and Bill is stood directly in front of you having said "Hello again Mr Atkinson" wondering why you are having a conversation with yourself and feeling most put out that you firstly don't remember his surname and secondly voice the fact when you could have just said "Oh, Hi Bill".

That and you look like a tool/Captain Cyborg wearing a Bluetooth headset.

Unless there is a way to filter out

...that one night in my younger years with the Rumplemintz where I woke up the next morning wearing only a cowboy hat having stolen all my neighbors garden hoses* - I won't be getting within 20m of any such devices (assuming of course they actually existed).

I don't even know WTF happened that night so I sure as hell don't want the cloud knowing ;)

*btw, that really is a true story - not me of course... this guy I know. Really, not me

Seems a little complex

DUH!

"the best way to interact with them is going to be a conversational user interface – as long as we can get natural language understanding to work"

Yeah, that's a bit of a key issue isn't it? No, really, thanks again Sherlock for your invaluable insight, your fat paycheck is in the post. However, may I ask the "legendary engineer" to have a bit less "ideas that smack you in the face", and a bit more ideas that "don't smack you in the face, but are easible and will reach the shop shelves befire star Trek also becomes a reality"?

I can be a "legendary engineer" too. How about a teleportation device AND that doesn't even need energy! Yeah, they might be a couple of issues to tackle, but I'll leave it to that for now. Where's my paycheck?

In the future-

So the future is, what, last week?

There's streets in this city where I can see that kind of shit all day.

It reminds me of the porn theater Mom and I used to drive past in the morning, back when I was still in high school. You would not believe the poor bastards you see coming out of one of those places at six o'clock on a Wednesday morning. But at least the pornhounds know they have a problem.

Sad...

This is what happens when the visionaries of yore grow old: they lose touch with the pace of innovation and the desires of the people that guide it. Especially when they haven't been involved in guiding it for so long.

I admire Mr. Atkinson immensely for his role in shaping the vision of personal computing that we currently enjoy. However, like Mr. Kay and even Mr. Wozniak, they really have very little new to say in the way of technology predictions.

Sub-vocalisation

I don't want to tell everyone in my vicinity what I'm looking for, where I'm going etc etc. I don't think natural language interface will take off until they can make it private, perhaps by being able to "hear" sub-vocalisations (yes, I've been reading Iain M. Banks).

Also, on the one hand he's talking about fairly far-future tech like a virtual assistant monitoring and logging every conversation you have (cocktail party effect?), on the other he's saying it will need things to handle current, temporary system constraints like bandwidth. When exactly does he think this is all going to happen?

Next level

Hows' about going beyond this interface and just_talking_to_each_other. We dont really NEED all that knowledge - has anyone seen beyond this fakery, we don't NEED IT outside of work and education.

All the knowledge and technology turns us into children, we're spoon fed, but really it's useless to us, its breadthe makes us feel good yet never quite knowing why. We forget to talk to each other - except via interfaces that fail to communicate the whole of our message (eg body language). So - we end up with nothing to say except inanities.

And the little voice in your head tells you.....

Listening and speaking is so very slow...

Awhile back when I fist got my Mac, I wrote an Applescript to read out e-mails using one of the Mac's built in voices. It also responded to voice commands allowing you to select e-mails, speak them and delete them. It was fun to do at the time but it's not used now. The reason? It is far, far faster to read the e-mails and use a mouse.

"That building is the Bank of America building."

There is a Bank of America building in my city, right downtown. My company has servers collocated in a hosting facility there.

It says "Bank of America", in very large type, right up at the top of this building -- even lights up at night. It also says the same things on the glass doors to the lobby, just in case you're too close to the building to see the big glowing sign right up at the top of it.

Surely speech is faster than typing.

However, a computer accepting "natural language" is and should be a very long way away. Too many mistakes will be made. I want a formal command system. Otherwise:

COMPUTER: You have another e-mail from your boss.

YOU: Oh God! Just shoot me now.

COMPUTER: * BLAM *

(If you're wondering what you were shot with, it's the reason why you're usually not allowed to eject the DVD while it's still spinning. "Shuriken+RW." Or, of course, the laser beam. Yes, your PC contains components outlawed by the Geneva Conventions.)

I disagree, in part

Sure, you could fire up Firefox, type something into Google and trawl through some webpages, a few clicks and you have the answer.

I guess the whole point is that if you are querying a large body of information then natural spoken language is the most efficient and easiest way for us to interact. We're just not used to doing in public with other people around to a device.

I think the guy has gone off the rails a bit regarding his idea that we could record our lives and later recall, but natural language *for some things* is the inevitable future.

Déjà vu

Dave: Shut yourself down, Hal.

HAL: I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that.

Arthur C Clarke's forward-thinking was iconic but I don't like the thought of anything which will increase the amount of moronic jabbering into mobile phones on the trains, on the busses or in the street.